Free media products conceal the total absence of consumer choice

Evidence

Horkheimer and Adorno observed long ago, in the age of radio, the peculiarity of the structure of a commercial “culture industry” in which the products were free. The analogy between media and market is in fact cemented by this mechanism: it is not because the media is like a market that the two things are comparable; rather it is because the “market” is as unlike its “concept” (or Platonic idea) as the media is unlike its own concept that the two things are comparable. The media offers free programs in whose content and assortment the consumer has no choice whatsoever but whose selection is then rebaptized “free choice.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 604

Categorization

• DEFINE: Classic explanation of the commercial culture industry’s structure: free products disguising zero choice as ‘free choice’.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s noise/silence work on information overload and broadcast media. — connects to: Social media free products are extraction lures, and users are raw-material sources, not products — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 43